


Almost Blinded

by Roadie



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Romance, alternate universe - seniors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-18 17:05:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16521137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadie/pseuds/Roadie
Summary: You know the fic trope of aging characters down, telling stories of them in high school or as young children?This fic flips that, and imagines Alex and Maggie as life-long friends, now in their 60s, realizing that they fell in love somewhere along the way.





	Almost Blinded

**Author's Note:**

> I had this idea yesterday, and it kind of forced itself out onto the page. Shout-out to [PerformativeZippers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/performativezippers/pseuds/performativezippers) and [Kelinswriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter/pseuds/Kelinswriter) for egging me on.
> 
> Unbetaed.
> 
> Disclaimer: I'm a few decades shy of being in my 60s, so this is not exactly writing what I know. But I have tried to handle the generational difference carefully, and am open to feedback from folks closer to that age than I am

Maggie looks up at the clock above the mantel. 6:57, it says, and she wonders if she needs to check the battery. It said 6:55 the last time she checked it, and she would swear that that was at least fifteen minutes ago.

Kate used to tease her for her love of analog clocks. 

“Do they even teach kids to read those anymore?” she had joked. “Digital clocks just tell you it’s 4:05 if it’s 4:05. No angles, no math, no wasted brainpower.”

Maggie has always liked the angles and the math. The split-second of second-level thinking that analog clocks compel you to do.

But now she wonders if the arms are stuck, or if something’s wrong with the power, because in her sixty-two years on this planet, she’s never felt time move so slowly.

The knuckles of her left hand are throbbing. Not all of them -- she’s got a little arthritis in her index and middle fingers. She rubs at them, absently, and walks to the kitchen to look at the digital clock on the stove.

(“See?” Kate asks, in her mind. Maggie fiddles with the wedding band that she wears on her right hand, now, instead of the left.)

The digital clock says 6:58.

\--

She never lived with Kate in this house. 

She met Kate in Gotham, when she was there on a temporary assignment. She’d been a young woman then, newly promoted to Detective III and angling for Sergeant. But she’d met Kate, and they’d fallen in love, and the temporary assignment turned permanent. 

Maggie had wanted to move back to National City after the wedding. Had wanted Kate to come with her. Alex still lived in National City, and Alex was, for all intents and purposes, Maggie’s only family.

“Couldn’t she come here?” Kate had asked.

But Alex had her husband, and her kids, and her job at the DEO. And Supergirl, of course, who was as much a part of National City as its sun and its traffic jams.

“Everything I have is in Gotham, love,” Kate had apologized, her hands warm in Maggie’s. “My business, my family’s estate, my networks. And National City has Supergirl and the Martian Manhunter but Batwoman -- she’s needed here.”

Maggie had acquiesced. She and Alex had found a rhythm of flying back and forth to visit each other a few times a year. When Alex started dating Matt, Maggie flew out to make sure she approved of him before things got too serious. When Maggie and Kate got engaged, Alex flew out a full two weeks before the wedding to help with the run-up, even though Kate had hired planners and staff to take care of the whole thing.

Alex had liked Kate. They’d gotten along easily, and well.

Kate and Maggie courted, and married, and lived in Gotham City. Maggie fought the corruption of the GCPD from the inside, Kate from the outside. 

And then Kate had died in Gotham City. That was six years ago. She’d been young -- just shy of 55. Colon cancer, it had been.

She had passed along the cowl to a younger woman a decade earlier, by then. But still: there was tragedy in the fact that someone who had lived her life to such extremes had, in the end, died from something so very banale.

Alex had flown out often, during Kate’s illness, and bought an open return ticket when things were nearing the end. She’d been there for the final few days, when Kate had been disoriented, in and out of consciousness; she made sure Maggie ate, she made sure Maggie slept and changed her clothes. And she’d been there, her hand on Maggie’s shoulder while Maggie held Kate’s hand in both of hers, when Kate passed.

She’d slept in Maggie’s bed with her for a week, holding her when she couldn’t bear to be alone in her grief.

“Come back to National City with me,” Alex had said. “You can stay with us for awhile. Matt already said he wouldn’t mind, and the kids would be over the moon. The NCPD would take you back in a heartbeat.”

But Maggie couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the home she’d shared with Kate so soon after losing Kate herself.

Eventually, Alex had had to go home. Home to National City, home to her children and her husband and her job. And Maggie had pushed through. She’d gone back to work, and she had good friends in Gotham who reached out to her, who kept her from becoming a shut-in, drowning in her loneliness.

Two years after that, after her kids had moved out, Alex called Maggie.

This was not, in itself, unusual. They spoke a few times a week. But this time her voice was wet and shaking.

“It’s over,” Alex had said.

“What’s over?” Maggie asked.

“Matt and me. We’re done. He’s going to visit his parents for a week, so I can pack up and move out.”

Maggie got on a plane the next day. She helped Alex find a short-term lease on an apartment in the building where she’d lived when they’d first met, near the DEO downtown office. Then, six months later, Maggie visited again and they went house-hunting; Alex bought a loft condo in a newish building in a gentrifying neighbourhood not too far from downtown.

“You know the Science Division is trying to hire a new captain,” Alex had said over Chinese food, eaten on a new sofa surrounded by packing boxes. “It’s been a mess over there for years, so they want to hire someone external to shake things up instead of promoting from within.”

The Kane mansion was old, and huge, and Maggie lived there alone but for the memory of Kate behind every doorway, in every chair, in every hallway.

So she applied for the job, and she got it. Then she packed up the things that were hers from the Kane mansion, and the things of Kate’s that she wanted to keep, and travelled back across the country. Back to National City. 

She bought a small house with a large yard, out on the edge of town. She’d never needed a lot of space to live. Never wanted it, really, it just came with the territory of marrying a Kane. But she liked the quiet, and she liked the breathable air -- the only things she’d ever missed from her childhood in Nebraska. 

On one side of the mantel in her new house, she stood a framed photograph from their wedding. On the other, she stood a photo of her and Alex -- a snap Matt had taken when Maggie had come to visit for Alex’s forty-fifth birthday. They’d been a little drunk, leaning into each other and giggling about something. Maggie’s hair was just barely streaked with grey, then. And Alex’s was still dyed the same auburn shade it had always been.

Alex’s hair is still dyed that colour. And Maggie, well. Maggie’s just embraced her grey.

Maggie looks at the clock.

7:00.

\--

She hears a car pull into her driveway at 7:02. Its engine turns off, and Maggie goes to the mirror by her front door. Her hair hangs long below her shoulders, and she tucks it behind her ears and fidgets with the collar of her shirt, wondering if she’s got the right number of buttons undone to look fashionable. Of course she’s fretting about this now, when she’s spent the last fifteen minutes doing nothing but pacing a groove into her living room rug.

The car door slams, and Maggie wonders if she will seem too eager if she opens the front door and waits there, in the doorway, while Alex comes up the walkway. She frets over this, her mind weighing the options, for long enough that the decision is made for her: Alex knocks twice and then enters, because Maggie has left the door unlocked for her.

Maggie always leaves the door unlocked for her.

But Alex walks in to see Maggie standing awkwardly in the middle of her hallway, stocking feet on the cool tile. 

“Hi,” she says. She smiles. 

Normally, they would hug each other. They always do. They always have; for as long as they’ve been friends, they’ve greeted each other with a hug.

Normal, though, has changed for them, recently. So Maggie lifts her hand to shoulder-height and waves, trying to force it to look natural.

“I made some coffee,” Maggie says as Alex bends to kick off her shoes. “Do you want some?”

“Sure.” Alex’s sock came half-loose as she took her shoe off, and she stays bent over, tugging it back into place.

Maggie doesn’t need to ask how Alex takes her coffee. Maggie has known for years. “Okay,” she says, “I’ll bring it to you in the living room.” 

Pouring the coffee forces Maggie to breathe deeply and to steady her shaking hands.

She carries the full mugs carefully. Alex has taken a seat on one side of the sofa, and Maggie reads it as a challenge: will she sit to her left, sharing the sofa? Or to her right, in the armchair?

Maggie takes a breath. They’ve tried to have this conversation already, once in the car and once at Alex’s, and both times they’ve failed. That’s why Alex has driven all the way out to Maggie’s this time.

Still, Maggie thinks, she’ll take the chair. It seems safer.

She sets Alex’s mug down on the coffee table and cups her own between her hands as goes to sit down. Alex takes her mug and sips almost immediately, but Maggie’s, without milk, is still too hot to drink. She holds it near her lips and blows on it.

“So,” she says. 

Alex sips, swallows, and then lowers her arms to brace them on her knees. She stares down into her mug. “So.”

\--

Kate had always wanted Maggie to love again.

When they’d realized they’d exhausted all of Kate’s treatment options, when they’d sat down for the most difficult conversation of Maggie’s life, it was the one thing that Kate had made perfectly, abundantly clear.

“I won’t tell you not to grieve,” she’d said, “but I will tell you not to grieve forever. We made each other happy, Mags, but I hope someone else will make you happy too.”

Maggie felt less lonely when she moved back to National City. The city was familiar enough to be recognizable, but changed enough to be new, compared to when she’d lived here before. And she saw Alex often. They’d consult on cases sometimes, and they’d spend time together at least once or twice during the week. For months, they were both giddy at the freedom of it: to se each other whenever they wanted! No plane tickets required!

Alex still had her sister nights with Kara, and sometimes they’d invite Maggie to join them. Maggie had been reluctant to intrude, at first; sister nights had always been sacrosanct. 

“Maggie, you’re basically family,” Kara said, once. “Come on, we ordered extra potstickers for you.”

Alex would have Maggie over when her kids would visit, too. Her son, Jerry, was a lawyer at a firm in LA, but he was so busy that she didn’t see him any more often than she saw Meghan, who was in her last year of undergrad at the University of Chicago. 

Alex’s kids liked Maggie, and Maggie liked them. They’d known her their whole lives. She’d come to many birthdays and both of their high school graduations.

They’ve always been like this, Alex and Maggie. They met through work years ago, when neither of them was quite thirty, and slowly, almost accidentally, built the kind of intimate, all-encompassing friendship that Maggie had only ever seen in movies. They were each other’s confidantes. They were each other’s rocks. 

Alex was the only family Maggie had ever really had, apart from Kate.

And it had been good. It had been safe, and comfortable, and Maggie’s life was so much better for Alex’s presence in it, and she hoped that she made Alex’s life a little better, too.

After Kate’s death and Alex’s divorce, both Alex and Maggie dated a bit. Maggie dated in Gotham before she moved to National City, and then she dated in National City, too. It was hard; singles their age were few and far between. Neither of them found anything serious. But they tried.

But then, a week ago.

They are women in their sixties, and they have known each other for more than thirty years, and somehow, a week ago, they made everything change.

They’d been at an alien bar. Not Dollywood; that one’s long since closed, but there’s a newer place they like, accessible through the back door of one of those out-of-the-box Irish pubs.

They were sitting there, with Kara and Lena and a few other people. The night wasn’t special; it was nobody’s birthday, nobody’s anniversary; they’d found themselves there after a long workday, and had cast out a broad net of invitations, and a surprising number had been taken up. Maggie had bought beers for her and Alex and a few others. Alex had bought them another round. And neither of them could drink like they used to; they found themselves a little, tiny bit drunk.

When they were ready to leave, Alex called them both a cab.

“You can stay at my place tonight, Sawyer,” she’d said, because there was no reason to take a taxi all the way to Maggie’s. They’d stumbled, tipsy, into the elevator and down the hall. In the loft, Maggie poured them both glasses of water while Alex fished out some pyjamas for Maggie to borrow. They giggled while they drank water, and then changed their clothes standing in the bedroom because they knew each other too well to be afraid to show their bodies. And then they’d collapsed, together, into Alex’s bed.

None of this was unusual. They’d shared beds under precisely this kind of circumstance dozens of times, or maybe more. Matt never thought anything of his wife sharing a bed with another woman when they went on girls’ weekends, of course. But even Kate hadn’t been bothered by it. She understood that this was the kind of friendship that Maggie and Alex shared.

But somehow, this time, things had changed. Tipsy, and giddy, they’d looked at each other across the pillows, and Maggie had clutched at Alex’s fingers between them.

They’d smiled. It had been a good evening. Maggie felt happy and safe with Alex, like she always had.

Still, though, what happened next had to have been her fault. Hadn’t it? Alex wasn’t gay; Alex had never said anything about interest in women. Alex had two children, conceived the common way. Her marriage to her husband lasted over twenty-five years.

Somehow, that night, they’d kissed.

Tentative, at first: a touch of the lips. And then bolder, their bodies coming together under the blankets, arms wrapped tightly around each others’ backs and shoulders.

Maggie, to her excitement and horror, to her thrill and terror, had liked it. 

Alex’s body felt familiar against hers. They hugged all the time, and Alex had held her in her sleep after Kate had died. But this was different: the warm confidence of Alex’s mouth, the soft yield of the rest of her. Alex had grown thinner with age, angular and bony, while Maggie had grown a little fuller, burdened with gravity, but they felt nice together, all the same. Maggie’s sex drive is slower to wake now than it was when she was younger, but in that moment, deep in her gut, she’d felt it flicker to life.

In the morning, they behaved like nothing happened. Maggie watched Alex carefully, watched her for signs of awkwardness and distance, or for intimacy and desire, but she found none of it. They laughed a little about their mild hangovers, and had eggs and toast and coffee, and then they’d walked back to where Maggie had left her car the night before.

Maggie had unlocked the door and opened it, but before she could drop into the driver’s seat, Alex had drawn her into a warm hug, fiercer than usual, bold and intimate for such a public setting.

“Are we okay?” she’d murmured into Maggie’s ear.

“Of course,” Maggie said. “Always.”

They saw each other again later that week. They met up at the DEO to discuss a case, and then decided to get thai food before going home, like they’d done when they were young. Maggie had driven Alex the scant few blocks home from the restaurant, and that time, Maggie knew that Alex started it. Maggie pulled over in front of Alex’s building, and Alex had blinked at her with those big eyes, and reached across to push strands of grey hair behind Maggie’s ears.

Maggie hadn’t had the strength to break the moment.

And when Alex pulled her across, pulled their mouths together, Maggie could never have stopped her.

Alex’s hair was cropped short, had been for years, and Maggie ran her fingers through it, ran her nails over the scalp, her pinky bumping up against the temple of Alex’s glasses, while Alex gripped her shoulder hard enough to bruise.

They parted with a small exchange of smiles and no words. Alex stopped after she’d stood up, bending to look at Maggie through the open door, and Maggie could see her breath quickening, like she was working up the courage to say something. 

But she didn’t. She smiled, and Maggie smiled back, and then Alex closed the door and walked to her building.

The drive home took about twelve minutes at this hour, there wasn’t much traffic, and Maggie’s hands shook the whole way. She clutched at the wheel, white-knuckled, to keep herself steady as much as the car, and by the time she got home she knew that they’d have to talk about this.

She texted Alex and told her so.

Alex texted back: Yes, you’re right. Come over tomorrow after work? 

Maggie had agreed.

The next evening, Maggie showed up with a decent bottle of white wine. Alex put out a plate of crackers and good cheese and a bowl of olives and they took everything to the coffee table. They sat on the sofa, side by side but turned to face each other. 

They didn’t talk about it right away. They talked about other things: work, Alex’s kids, the news, the work they needed to do on their homes. They were breaking the ice, Maggie thought. Or that’s what they told herself, but an hour in they were reminiscing about Kara’s early Supergirl days, laughing loudly and fondly. Without thinking Maggie would touch Alex’s knee with the tips of her fingers, and Alex would nudge Maggie’s thigh with her own, but that didn’t mean much. They had always had a friendship of touch.

This time it was Maggie who looked over at Alex, during a brief, quiet pause. They had both dropped their heads back against the top of the sofa and rolled their heads to face each other. Maggie could feel her hair hanging down off the back, and the upholstery made Alex’s stick out in strange ways, and Maggie couldn’t help herself: she reached over, touched Alex’s chin, and kissed her again.

And Alex had tugged her closer and kissed her back.

This time, though, it hadn’t stopped there. 

Alex’s body had long since started to feel the impacts of her years as a DEO field agent: the broken leg, the artificial knee, the years and years of impact on her neck and spine, but Maggie’s body was more nimble. So Maggie found herself astride Alex’s lap, and then they both found themselves stretched along the couch, and they’d kissed in a way that Maggie hadn’t kissed since things with Kate had been new and exciting. Their hands moved. Alex’s were bold but nervous, rubbing the length of Maggie’s back, the outsides of her hips, the almost-innocent sides of her ribs. Maggie, something near-dormant awoken in her, had been more confident: she touched Alex’s chest through her sweater, tugged at the backs of her thighs, and Alex gasped in surprise and pressed herself closer.

Some time later -- Maggie couldn’t say exactly how long -- Maggie pulled away. She clambered off the couch, her back protesting but her heart racing so fast she barely noticed the pain.

“I’d better go,” she’d said, “before this gets further out of hand.”

Alex, her head on the sofa armrest, had nodded, running her hands over her face as if it would clear her mind.

“Tomorrow?" She’d asked. “To talk?”

“Yeah.” Maggie nodded. “Um, my place? At seven?”

“I’ll be there.”

On the way home, Maggie had stopped and picked up falafel gyro like she used to do when she was in college, after a night at a party or out with friends or, once in awhile, after a hookup. This felt like none of these things. They’d had a little wine each but Maggie was sober, and if Maggie was sober then Alex was sober. But still, as she sat in a booth in that fluorescent-lit diner, Maggie felt young and reckless, thrilled and excited and scared like she’d felt back then.

\--

Maggie didn’t have work today, so she spent her morning cleaning her house: mopping, vacuuming, wiping counters, cleaning toilets. It felt strange: Alex knows what her house is normally like, she knows that Maggie is terrible about dusting baseboards and the TV stand but both are clean right now.

And now she’s sitting on Maggie’s couch, lit from the sun through the bay window behind her. Her sweater hangs from her bony shoulders. She stares at her coffee mug, watching the milk swirl through, but if she’s nervous, she doesn’t show it.

Maggie realizes, quite suddenly, that this change they’ve made between them may not be something she can undo.

She screws up all of her courage and asks, “So what are we doing?” 

Alex smiles, her eyes flitting up to Maggie’s and down again, and shrugs. “That’s what we’re here to decide, isn’t it?”

Maggie exhales. She leans forward, her elbows on her knees, like Alex, and runs a hand through her hair. “Have you done something like this before? With a woman.”

Alex shakes her head slowly. “No.”

“I just -- I’ve known you for a long time, Alex, and I’ve never heard you say -- or, or even hint -- that something like this would be something you’d want.” 

“I know.” Alex nods. “I know.”

“So--so is it?”

“Is it?”

“Something you want.”

A silence hangs between them, but not a heavy one. Maggie can hear the ticking of the clock like it’s the clicking of the gears of Alex’s ferocious mind.

“What about you?” Alex asks. “Is it something you want?”

“Come on, Alex,” Maggie says, but it’s quiet. As gentle as she can make it. “You know that’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I was married to a woman for twenty years,” Maggie says, “and you’ve never kissed a woman before this week. So no, it’s not the same.”

“Okay,” Alex says, and nods again. But this time, it’s not a confident nod: it’s a jerky movement, like she’s trying to convince herself of something. She sits up, begins to lift her mug to her lips, but as soon as her weight comes off her elbows her hands begin to shiver, the coffee rippling.

It’s the crack that Maggie needed to see. The fracture in the armor. In the facade.

This conversation is as terrifying for Alex as it is for her.

“Whoa, Alex,” Maggie says. She sets her own mug down on the coffee table and then reaches for Alex’s, setting it down too. And then, after a brief debate, she stands and slips through the space between Alex’s knees and the coffee table to sit on her other side, close to her, a steadying hand on her shoulder. 

Alex leans into it, and Maggie feels her shivering slow.

“You are the most important person in my life,” Maggie says quietly. “Even when Kate was alive, you were as important to me as she was. Just in a different way.”

Alex rubs at the bridge of her nose, squinting into the pressure, but Maggie can tell she’s listening.

“So what I want, above all else, is not to lose that,” Maggie says. “We’ve crossed some lines that -- that I don’t think we ever really intended to cross. But I will only regret it if it drives a wedge between us.”

“It won’t,” Alex says, fire in her voice. She turns and holds Maggie’s eyes with her own, really holds them, for the first time in all of this. “I don’t regret it.”

“Okay,” Maggie smiles. “Good.”

Alex faces forward again. She reaches for the coffee and takes a sip, and as she sets it down, Maggie sees that her hands aren’t shaking as hard as they were a moment ago.

She squeezes Alex’s shoulder for comfort, anyway.

“You know Matt thought we were having an affair,” Alex says.

Maggie barks out a laugh. _“What?”_

Alex nods, half-smiling. “He asked me about it off and on for years -- almost our whole marriage, to be honest. Once, near the end, he told me he’d assumed that we were having sex when we saw each other, but decided not to worry about it since you lived in Gotham and we only saw each other a few times a year.”

Maggie feels a rock settling at the base of her lungs. 

She’d had no idea.

“Oh, Alex, is that why you two -- did that affect --”

“The divorce?” 

Maggie can only nod.

“I don’t know. Probably. Thinking back, it’s hard to untangle the causes from the effects, at the end. We were fighting so much, about so many things. It felt constant. We did fight about you, among other things. He accused me of being more emotionally available for you than I was for him.”

Maggie’s heart races. In front of her, beyond Alex, is the door to the main hall, the mirror hanging there. To her left, the wide opening to the kitchen, the window that overlooks the yard.

It’s all so familiar, this home that’s been hers for more than three years.

And yet everything suddenly feels fiercely, violently foreign.

“You should have told me,” she says.

Alex laughs bitterly. “Why? So you could back out of my life? I know you, Maggie. You’d have been a self-sacrificing idiot in the name of some imaginary version of nobility.”

This, Maggie concedes, is probably true.

But Matt is a good guy. He’s kind, and smart, and was never weird about the fact that Alex makes more money and wields more professional power than he does, and he’s a great dad to their kids. Maggie had known when he and Alex were having trouble at the end, of course. Alex had taken a few weekend trips to visit her in Gotham because she needed to get away--

When he’d probably, apparently, thought they’d been fucking.

“Our sex life always sucked,” Alex continues, and Maggie’s eyebrows fly up at that, too.

She’d never known. That seems like the kind of thing she should have known.

“I’d come up with excuses to get out of it. Faked my orgasms for most of my life. And he tried, you know. He was never selfish in bed. He’d give me candle-lit massages, he was generous with oral sex, he’d spend entire nights focused entirely on me, asking nothing for himself.”

This doesn’t surprise Maggie. Matt had been smitten with Alex from the moment they’d met. Maggie can remember the first time she met him, over pizza at a place downtown, and Matt hadn’t been able to take his eyes off of Alex the whole time.

“It wasn’t until later that I realized that the only time it worked was when I closed my eyes and took myself… away. Imagined myself with someone who was… I didn’t know, exactly, but not him.”

She lifts her eyes to Maggie’s, and they’re tired and sad but dry. “It took years to realize that,” she says, “but when I did, I ended things for good.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Maggie says, sliding her hand around to the back of Alex’s neck, where it’s warm from the evening sun setting behind her. Alex’s breath has slowed. Maggie can feel her pulse at the hollow between her neck and shoulder, and it’s not racing anymore.

“And then you moved back,” Alex says. She sets her coffee down again and laces her fingers together, twisting and untwisting, twisting and untwisting, until Maggie reaches out and sets her free palm overtop, stilling them. 

Alex finds Maggie’s eyes, and Maggie can see the fear there, the courage. “You moved back, and I realized I wanted to be close to you. I wanted to sit beside you at dinners out with our friends. I wanted you to stay with me, to sleep in my bed, just to have you close.”

“Oh, Alex,” Maggie says, because she can find no other words. She brings both of her hands to Alex’s, now, and clutches her fingers tightly, and wonders if she can keep herself from crying.

“I think I always wanted that,” Alex whispers, hot and fervent, her fingers tight around Maggie’s. “I think--I think Matt knew. And I think I didn’t let myself see it before the divorce. Because I was married to him, so I focused on what I had instead of what I know now, on some subconscious level, I wanted more.”

“Me,” Maggie says. But it’s an offering, not a demand, or even a question.

Alex nods, giving and vulnerable. “You.” 

Maggie would not change her years with Kate. Would not give them up.

But as she looks at Alex with wonder, now: at her short-cropped, artfully messy auburn hair; at her wide eyes behind fashionable glasses; at the smile lines and frown lines and concentration furrows that are all younger than their friendship, she thinks about her future, not her past. 

Alex must think she’s unsure, must think she’s wavering, because she squeezes Maggie’s hand and says, her voice sounding raw, “I think I’ve always been in love with you. I just didn’t know that’s what it was. And now, I want to just… to be in love with you, knowing that I am. Knowing that you know that I am.”

Maggie searches those deep brown eyes and finds nothing there but Alex, open and honest.

She wonders how she can be so lucky, to have two great loves in her life.

Kate, she knows, would want this for her.

Maggie smiles and reaches up, cradling Alex’s face in her palm.

“I never thought I’d be so lucky,” she says, as soft as she can, as soft as a caress.

Alex, her eyes bright and relieved, grins back at her.

And Maggie kisses her with a lifetime of love behind them, and a lifetime of love still to give.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from [Carina Round, "Sit Tight"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXj9Ipp21js): _Someday you're gonna find her, she will be almost blinded by the light so bright you keep inside you heart._


End file.
